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Urania. Her parents had done her no favor; her name suggested a planet,
a mineral, anything but the slender, fine-featured woman with burnished
skin and large, dark, rather sad eyes who looked back at her from the
mirror. Urania! What an idea for a name. Fortunately nobody called her
that anymore; now it was Uri, Miss Cabral, Ms. Cabral, Dr. Cabral. As
far as she could remember, after she left Santo Domingo (or Ciudad Trujillo
-- when she left they had not yet restored the old name to the capital
city), no one in Adrian, or Boston, or Washington, D.C., or New York had
called her Urania as they did at home and at the Santo Domingo Academy,
where the sisters and her classmates pronounced with absolute correctness
the ridiculous name inflicted on her at birth. Was it his idea or hers?
Too late to find out, my girl; your mother was in heaven and your father
condemned to a living death. You'll never know. Urania! As absurd as insulting
old Santo Domingo de Guzman by calling it Ciudad Trujillo. Could that
have been her father's idea too?

She waits
for the sea to become visible through the window of her room on the ninth
floor of the Hotel Jaragua, and at last she sees it. The darkness fades
in a few seconds and the brilliant blue of the horizon quickly intensifies,
beginning the spectacle she has been anticipating since she woke at four
in spite of the pill she had taken, breaking her rule against sedatives.
The dark blue surface of the ocean, marked by streaks of foam, extends
to a leaden sky at the remote line of the horizon, while here, at the
shore, it breaks in resounding, whitecapped waves against the Sea Walk,
the Malecón, where she can make out sections of the broad road through
the palms and almond trees that line it. Back then, the Hotel Jaragua
faced the Malecón directly. Now it's to the side. Her memory brings back
the image -- was that the day? -- of the little girl holding her father's
hand as they entered the hotel restaurant so the two of them could have
lunch together. They were given a table next to the window, and through
the sheer lace curtains Urania could see the spacious garden and the pool
with its diving boards and swimmers. In the Patio Espanol, surrounded
by glazed tiles and flowerpots filled with carnations, an orchestra was
playing merengues. Was that the day? "No" she says aloud. The Jaragua
of those days had been torn down and replaced by this massive shocking-pink
structure that had surprised her so much when she arrived in Santo Domingo
three days ago.

Were you
right to come back? You'll be sorry, Urania. Wasting a week's vacation,
when you never had time to visit all the cities, regions, countries you
would have liked to see -- the mountain ranges and snow-covered lakes
of Alaska, for instance -- returning to the island you swore you'd never
set foot on again. A symptom of decline? The sentimentality of age? Curiosity,
nothing more. To prove to yourself you can walk along the streets of this
city that is no longer yours, travel through this foreign country and
not have it provoke sadness, nostalgia, hatred, bitterness, rage in you.
Or have you come to confront the ruin of your father? To learn what effect
seeing him has on you, after so many years. A shudder runs the length
of her body. Urania, Urania! What if after all these years you discover
that behind your determined, disciplined mind, impervious to discouragement,
behind the fortress admired and envied by others, you have a tender, timid,
wounded, sentimental heart?

She bursts
into laughter. Enough foolishness, my girl.

She puts
on sneakers, slacks, a tailored blouse, and pulls back her hair. She drinks
a glass of cold water and is about to turn on the television to watch
CNN but changes her mind. She remains at the window, looking at the ocean,
the Malecón, and then, turning her head, at the city's forest of roofs,
towers, domes, belfries, and treetops. It's grown so much! When you left,
in 1961, it sheltered three hundred thousand souls. More than a million
now. It has filled up with neighborhoods, avenues, parks, hotels. The
night before, she felt like a foreigner as she drove a rented car past
the condominiums in Bella Vista, and the immense El Mirador Park, where
there were as many joggers as in Central Park. When she was a girl, the
city ended at the Hotel El Embajador; beyond that point, it was all farms
and fields. The Country Club, where her father took her on Sundays to
swim in the pool, was surrounded by open countryside, not the asphalt,
houses, and street-lights that are there now.

But the
colonial city has not been modernized, and neither has Gazcue, her neighborhood.
And she is absolutely certain her house has hardly changed at all. It
must be the same, with its small garden, old mango tree, and the flamboyán
with red flowers bending over the terrace where they used to have lunch
outdoors on weekends; the sloping roof and the little balcony outside
her bedroom, where she would go to wait for her cousins Lucinda and Manolita,
and, during that last year, 1961, spy on the boy who rode past on his
bicycle, watching her out of the comer of his eye and not daring to speak.
Would it be the same inside? The Austrian clock that sounded the hours
had Gothic numerals and a hunting scene. Would her father be the same?
No. You've seen him failing in the photos sent to you every few months
or years by Aunt Adelina and other relatives who continued to write even
though you never answered their letters.

She drops
into an armchair. The rising sun penetrates to the center of the city;
the dome of the National Palace and its pale ocher walls sparkle gently
under a curve of blue. Go now, soon the heat will be unbearable. She closes
her eyes, overcome by a rare inertia, for she is accustomed to always
being active and not wasting time in what, since her return to Dominican
soil, has occupied her day and night: remembering. "This daughter of mine
is always working, she even repeats her lessons when she's asleep" That's
what Senator Agustín Cabral, Minister Cabral, Egghead Cabral used to say
about you when he boasted to his friends about the girl who won all the
prizes, the student the sisters always held up as an example. Did he boast
to the Chief about Urania's scholarly achievements? "I'd like so much
for you to know her, she has won the Prize for Excellence every year since
she enrolled at Santo Domingo. It would make her so happy to meet you
and shake your hand. Urania prays every night for God to protect that
iron health of yours. And for Dona Julia and Dona María as well. Do us
this honor. The most loyal of your dogs asks, begs, implores you. You
can't refuse: receive her. Excellency! Chief!"

Do you despise
him? Do you hate him? Still? "Not anymore," she says aloud. You wouldn't
have come back if the rancor were still sizzling, the wound still bleeding,
the deception still crushing her, poisoning her, the way it did in your
youth, when studying and working became an obsessive defense against remembering.
Back then you did hate him. With every atom of your being, with all the
thought and feeling your body could hold. You wanted him to suffer misfortunes,
diseases, accidents. God granted your wish, Urania. Or rather, the devil
did. Isn't it enough that the cerebral hemorrhage brought him a living
death? A sweet revenge that he has spent the last ten years in a wheelchair,
not walking or talking, depending on a nurse to eat, lie down, dress,
undress, trim his nails, shave, urinate, defecate? Do you feel avenged?
"No."

She drinks
a second glass of water and goes out. It's seven in the morning. On the
ground floor of the Jaragua she is assaulted by the noise, that atmosphere,
familiar by now, of voices, motors, radios blaring at full volume, merengues,
salsas, danzones, boleros, rock, rap, all jumbled together, assailing
one another and assailing her with their shrill clamor. Animated chaos,
the profound need in what was once your people, Urania, to stupefy themselves
into not thinking and, perhaps, not even feeling. An explosion of savage
life, immune to the tide of modernization. Something in Dominicans clings
to this prerational, magical form: this appetite for noise. ("For noise,
not music.")

She doesn't
remember a commotion like this in the street when she was a girl and Santo
Domingo was called Ciudad Trujillo. Perhaps it didn't exist back then:
perhaps, thirty-five years ago, when the city was three or four times
smaller, provincial, isolated, made wary by fear and servility, its soul
shrinking in terrified reverence for the Chief, the Generalissimo, the
Benefactor, the Father of the New Nation, His Excellency Dr. Rafael Leonidas
Trujillo Molina, it was quieter and less frenetic. Today, all the clamor
of life -- car engines, cassettes, records, radios, horns, barks, growls,
human voices -- seems to resound at top volume, producing vocal, mechanical,
digital, or animal noise at maximum capacity (dogs bark louder, birds
chirp with more enthusiasm). And New York is famous for being noisy! Never,
in the ten years she has spent in Manhattan, have her ears been subjected
to anything like the brutal, cacophonous symphony in which she has been
immersed for the past three days.

The sun
burns the silvery tops of towering palms, the broken sidewalk with so
many holes it looks bombed, the mountains of trash that some women with
scarves tied around their heads sweep up and correct in inadequate bags.
"Haitians." They're silent now, but yesterday they were whispering among
themselves in Creole. A little farther on, she sees two barefoot, half-naked
Haitian men sitting on boxes under dozens of vividly colored paintings
displayed on the wall of a building. It's true, the city, perhaps the
country, has filled with Haitians. Back then, it didn't happen. Isn't
that what Senator Agustín Cabral said? "You can say what you like about
the Chief. History, at least, will recognize that he has created a modern
country and put the Haitians in their place. Great ills demand great remedies!"
The Chief found a small country barbarized by wars among the caudillos,
a country without law and order, impoverished, losing its identity, invaded
by its starving, ferocious neighbors. They waded across the Masacre River
and came to steal goods, animals, houses, they took the jobs of our agricultural
workers, perverted our Catholic religion with their diabolical witchcraft,
violated our women, ruined our Western, Hispanic culture, language, and
customs, imposed their African savagery on us. The Chief cut the Gordian
knot: "Enough!" Great ills demand great remedies! He not only justified
the massacre of Haitians in 1937; he considered it a great accomplishment
of the regime. Didn't he save the Republic from being prostituted a second
time by that marauding neighbor? What do five, ten, twenty thousand Haitians
matter when it's a question of saving an entire people?

Haunted all
her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania
Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic -- and finds herself reliving
the events of 1961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and
one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the
depraved, ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his
inner circle (including Urania's father, a secretary of state now in disgrace)
with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace,
treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp
is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution
is already under way that will have bloody consequences of its own.

In this magisterial
and long-awaited novel, Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime
and the terrible birth of a democracy, giving voice to the historical
Trujillo and to the victims, both innocent and complicit, who were drawn
into his deadly orbit.

Mario
Vargas Llosais
widely perceived as the next Spanish-speaking Nobel Prize in Literature.
Vargas Llosa is one of the most cosmopolitan writers in Latin America
having lived in Paris, London and Barcelona as well as in Lima and other
Latin America capitals. His novel La Casa Verde, 1966, established
his reputation as one of the most outstanding contemporary Latin American
authors. Vargas Llosa pronounced the now famous "literature is fire"
statement in which he upheld the writer's function as a contributor to
the founding of a new social order out of the ashes of old injustices.
His political awareness, initially of a leftist-communist leaning, turned
conservative and to run for President of his country, however he lost
the election to the Japanese-Peruvian Alberto Fujimori (who escaped to
his ancestral homeland Japan after a corruption scandal in 2000).

Edith
Grossman has translated the poetry and prose of major Spanish-language
authors, including Gabriel García Marquez, Alvaro Mutis, and Mayra Montero,
as well as Mario Vargas Llosa.